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Honour in Life, Death and in the Memory: Funeral Monuments in Early Modern England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Nigel Llewellyn
Nigel Llewellyn
Affiliation:
The University of Cambridge
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Extract

In the parish churches and cathedrals of England and Wales stand many thousands of early modern funeral monuments. Typically, these are elaborate structures of carved stone, often painted and decorated in bright colours and trimmed with gilding. Their complex programmes of inscribed text, allegorical figures, heraldic emblazons and sculpted effigies are set within architectural frameworks. With a few exceptions, such as the famous memorials to Queen Elizabeth, William Shakespeare or John Donne, these monuments are relatively little studied and little known. However, they were extremely costly to their patrons and prominently displayed in churches in purpose-built family chapels or against the wall of the sanctuary. Contemporary comment reveals that they were accorded high status by both specialist commentators, such as antiquaries and heralds, and by the patrons who invested in them so heavily. All-in-all, they represent what was the most important kind of church art made in the post-Reformation England, a period when there was a great deal of general uncertainty about the status of visual experience and particular worries about the legitimacy of religious imagery.

Type
Honour and Reputation in Early-Modern England
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 6 , December 1996 , pp. 179 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1996

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References

1 Much of the material presented in this paper may be found in a more fully developed form in two books: Llewellyn, Nigel, Signs of Life: Funeral Monuments in the Visual Culture of Post-Reformation England (Cambridge, in press)Google Scholar, and Llewellyn, Nigel, The Art of Death: The Visual Culture of the English Death Ritual, c.1500–c.1800 (1991)Google Scholar.

2 For memoria see Death in the Middle Ages, ed. Braet, H. and Verbecke, W. (Louvain, 1983)Google Scholar.

3 On iconoclasm see Aston, Margaret, England's Iconoclasts: Laws against Images (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar, and Nigel Llewellyn, ‘Cromwell and the Tombs: Historiography and Style in Post-Reformation English Funeral Monuments’, in L'Art et les Revolutions, IV, ed. Chatelet, A. (Strasburg, 1992), 193–204Google Scholar.

4 Fowler, R. C., ‘The Denny Monument at Waltham Abbey’, Transactions of the Essex Archaeological Society, new series XVI (1923), 57–9Google Scholar, which includes a transcription of the contractual document.

5 There is no complete account of faculties in relation to monuments, however, see Burch, Brian, ‘Faculty Records and Church Monuments’, Bulletin of the International Society for the Study of Church Monuments, VI (1982), 97–114Google Scholar.

6 For the Tudor and Stuart commemorative investment in the Abbey see Llewellyn, Nigel, ‘The Royal Body: Monuments to the Dead, for the Living’, in Renaissance Bodies. The Human Figure in English Culture c.1540–1660, ed. Gent, L. and Llewellyn, N (London, 1990), 218–40Google Scholar.

7 For an account of stylistic development in monuments in the Abbey see White, Adam, ‘Westminster Abbey in the Early Seventeenth Century: A Powerhouse of Ideas’, Church Monuments, VII (1989), 16–53Google Scholar.

8 For monuments to children see Wilson, Jean, ‘Seated Children on Seventeenth Century Tombs’, Church Monuments Society Newsletter, VIII (ii) (1993), 47–9Google Scholar, and for the Russell tomb see Gladstone, H. C., Building an Identity: two noblewomen in England 1566–1666 (D. Phil, thesis, Open University, 1989)Google Scholar.

9 The DNB is wrong to claim that the monument to Lady Lennox was erected by James I after his accession, her will (Public Record Office MS PROB 11/60 fo. 93 recto), dated 26 February 1577 (that is, 1578) states ‘And my bodie to be buried in the greate churche of Westminster in the monument, Sepulture or Tombe, alreadie bargayned for, and appointed to me made and sett uppe in the saide churche ….’

10 Holland, Henry, Heruulogia Anglica hoc est clarissimorum et doctossimorum … (1620), 113Google Scholar.

11 Weever, John. Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631), 634Google Scholar.

12 For the Hertford monument see Fuller, Thomas, The History of the Worthies of England (1662), part vi, 144Google Scholar, and Symonds, Richard, ‘The Diary of the Marches Kept by the Royal Army …’, ed. Long, C. E., Camden Society, LXXIV (1854), 134Google Scholar; for the Bodley monument see most recently Wilson, Jean, ‘The Memorial by Nicholas Stone to Sir Thomas Bodley’, Church Monuments, VIII (1993), 57–62Google Scholar.

13 The decree reprinted by Weever, Ancient Funeral Monuments, 52–4.

14 Important work on this subject has been undertaken by Gent, Lucy in her Picture and Poetry, 1560–1620 … (Leamington Spa, 1981)Google Scholar, and ‘“The Rash Gaze”: Economies of Vision in Britain, 1550–1660’, in Albion's Classicism: The Visual Arts in Britain, 1550–1650, ed. Gent, Lucy (New Haven and London, 1995), 377–93Google Scholar.

15 This is a general reference to the ideas pursued by James, in several publications, typically in Family, Lineage and Civil Society. A Study of Society, Politics and Mentality in the Durham Region, 1500–1640 (Oxford, 1974)Google Scholar.

16 This monument is fully catalogued in volume 2 of my unpublished Ph.D. thesis, ‘John Weever and English Funeral Monuments of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’ (Warburg Institute, University of London, 1983)Google Scholar.

17 See Llewellyn, Nigel, ‘Claims to Status through Visual Codes: Heraldry on Post-Reformation English Funeral Monuments’, in Chivalry in the Renaissance, ed. Anglo, S. (Woodbridge, 1990), 145–60Google Scholar.

18 The will can be found in PCC 51 Leicester, that is, Public Record Office MS PROB n/74 fo.I recto.

19 Conveniently available in Elizabethan People. State and Society, ed. Hurstfield, Joel and Smith, Alan G. R. (1972)Google Scholar.

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22 See von Bülow's, G. edition of the diary in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, new series VI (1892), 9Google Scholar.

23 History from Marble, ed. Nichols, J. G. (1867), I, lxiiiGoogle Scholar.

24 Diary. ed. Long, C. E. (for the Camden Society), LXXIV (1859), 202–3Google Scholar.